By Garrett Ray
Grassroots Editor
Spring 1988

Ed DeCourcy died Aug. 11, 2005, at the age of 93. His wife, Alice, died Jan. 21, 2003, at the age of 91.

Edward and Alice DeCourcy live on a New Hampshire hillside in a house that fits them as comfortably as an L.L. Bean shirt.

The ceilings are low and sheltering; a cast iron Vermont Casting wood stove warms the living room. A sun filled farm kitchen and stacks of books and newspapers provide an unpretentious welcome.

After more than four decades of newspapering in Connecticut and New Hampshire, the DeCourcys give occasional thought to moving west. To those who know them, the idea may seem as shocking as bulldozing a New England maple to transplant it to a California shopping mall.

Ed DeCourcy, retired editor of the Newport (N.H.) Argus Champion, may be New England’s most respected editor. Certainly, he is one of the most honored weekly editors in the nation. Among the more than 150 awards he has received are both major awards given by the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors: the Golden Quill (1971) and the Eugene Cervi Award (1981).

His Golden Quill recognition made history. That year, two editorials tied for the award for the first time. DeCourcy wrote both of them.

In retirement, he continues to write weekly columns from the garret office in his home. His audience now comprises eight New England publications, including the Argus Champion.

On a recent Sunday afternoon before the New Hampshire presidential primary, New England’s most respected editor was waiting for a crew from NBC Television. The crew arrived a couple of hours late, causing him to miss attending a local lecture sponsored by Amnesty International.

“They were here for three hours,” he said the next morning. “They were trying to get a feel for what changes there have been and probably will be in this area, with the influx of new residents and the change that is going on.” He added, laughing, “They’ll use about 25 seconds.” (Actually, they used nothing.)

If DeCourcy had not found his way to the weekly newspaper business, he might have been a successful talk show host on radio or television. A lively conversationalist and gifted story teller, he was called on occasionally by National Public Radio for commentaries and election news analysis.

“I dabbled in radio when I was in college at the University of Maine,” he recalls. “At that time (in the early 1930s), there were only two or three radio stations in the state of Maine. I started a once a week broadcast on the Bangor station with news from and about the university.”

Fortunately for the newspaper profession, DeCourcy also edited the college paper. “I would sit there banging away on news and editorials and thinking up ideas. I thought it would be great to spend my life doing this. I knew then that I wanted community journalism.”

His father, who as a youth sold newspapers on street corners in Brooklyn, had cautioned him about the business. “He understood newspapers,” DeCourcy says. “When I got my first reporting job as a stringer on the Norwalk (Conn.) Hour, he gave me some advice.”

DeCourcy’s father told him that making a mistake in a newspaper is like climbing to the top of the Empire State Building with a feather pillow, breaking open the pillow in a high wind, scattering the feathers - and then trying to pick up all the feathers.

Ed remembered. Taped to the front of his typewriter is this command: “Accuracy! Accuracy!! Accuracy!!!”

His father’s homily served him well when he edited the weekly Westport (Conn.) Town Crier in the late 1940s. Like many weekly editors, he was both reporter and editorial writer.

“I wrote an editorial endorsing the Republican incumbent selectman,” DeCourcy says. “His Democratic opponent had been a selectman before I got there and was a very popular guy. A couple of days after that, the Democratic town committee met; I covered it. They spent about three quarters of the meeting condemning me. I took notes and went back and wrote a story about what had happened.”

After the story came out, the Democratic candidate walked into DeCourcy’s office. “He just stood there and looked at me. Then he said, ‘How could you do that?’ I told him, ‘I just wrote a story about what happened at your meeting.’ ‘You sure did,’ he said.

“People ask, how can you be a reporter and an editor at the same time?’ I didn't think that it was particularly difficult.”

“Ed’s a thoroughly decent person, and his writings and editorial work alwaysreflected that,” says Bill Rotch of the Milford (N.H.) Cabinet, a close friend of the DeCourcys. “And he had a publisher who allowed him to reflect that.”

Indeed, DeCourcy’s 20 year career on the Newport paper was marked by an extraordinary degree of editorial freedom. Jim Ewing, publisher of the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel, describes how the relationship began.

“My partner, Walter Paine, and I owned two New Hampshire dailies, and each of us ran one of them,” Ewing says. “We bought the weekly in Newport, and on the day we signed the documents, we sort of looked at each other and said, ‘Who the hell are we going to get to run this?’”

Ewing admired DeCourcy, who was by then the highly respected editor of the weekly Milford (Conn.) Citizen. “He knew everybody in the newspaper business in New England,” Ewing says. He called his friend for suggestions.

“After I described the situation to him, there was a long pause. Then Ed said, ‘I might be interested myself.’ I almost dropped the phone.”

In 1961 the DeCourcys moved to Newport. They bought their home, surrounded by 160 acres of woodlands, in May of that year.

The owners told DeCourcy to run the paper as if it were his own. “Neither Walter nor I are absentee owners by temperament,” Ewing says. “It made no sense for us to get a superb newspaperman and look over his shoulder.”

“I’m very much aware that I was really blessed,” DeCourcy says. “I got credit for a lot of things that were possible only because of the kind of guys I worked for.”

The relationship got its first and only major test in the second year after DeCourcy took over the Argus Champion. One of the candidates for the Republican nomination to Congress was a local arch conservative. DeCourcy wrote an editorial supporting another candidate.

He remembers that “my ad man came in and said, ‘We’re in trouble. We’re going to lose a lot of advertising if we don't support our local guy.’”

“I didn’t believe it,” DeCourcy continued. “I went out and talked to our advertisers and found that it was true; we could lose $10,000. So I went to Jim and Walter and laid it out for them. They said, ‘Why are you talking to us about it? We told you to run that paper as though you owned it. We meant it.” Paine added, “We can’t let a bunch of advertisers tell us how to run our newspaper.”

DeCourcy responded with a news story about the boycott, as well as an editorial saying that any newspaper that would knuckle under to such pressure would be a prostitute. His candidate subsequently won the nomination and the election. “He served 18 years, but he didn’t reflect my views on many issues,” DeCourcy says with a laugh.

DeCourcy has never claimed to be a good businessman. “I think he’s right," Ewing says. “That’s one of his charms. If you want someone who is just a businessman, there’s no sense being in the newspaper business. You might as well be making toothpaste. What you hope is to have a first class newspaperman who has enough grasp of the business side to fulfill the expectations of the owners.

“We never made a whole lot of money there, but we were never in it to make a big killing. We weren’t pressing Ed for bottom line performance, and he didn’t have to press us for freedom, because he had it.”

The editor used his freedom to express his views on issues ranging from refugee resettlement to the superiority of the pre-1930 L.C. Smith typewriter.

DeCourcy’s opinions flow easily, with little rewriting, from the keyboard of a manual typewriter - not an L.C. Smith, but an Olympia. When he and Alice travel, he carries a portable Olympia. “If you’re a newspaperman, you can write anywhere. I can put it on my knees on a park bench.”

He offers several dozen reasons why he has not purchased a word processor, then adds, “The real reason is that I don’t really need it. I use press room scrap for copy paper, and I can type lots of carbons; I think I can get more carbons on copy paper than on regular bond paper.”

The carbons supply his newspaper clients throughout New England. “Essentially, I write two or three columns a week,” he explains. “I double up; I don’t write individual columns for each paper.

“I’d like to be writing columns on the same things that David Broder and those other guys are writing about, but newspapers can get plenty of stuff that’s better than mine from the syndicates,” he says. “So I try to keep some New Hampshire aspect to what I’m writing about.”

For example, he led a recent column praising presidential candidate Paul Simon, a longtime friend of the DeCourcys and a former member of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, with a discussion about the condition of Interstate Highway 95 in New Hampshire. That led to explaining Simon’s plans for putting America back to work. “I don’t do only political columns,” he adds. “I can write about the dog, about the weather.” Last year he wrote a column for the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel about the difficulty of obtaining essential items like cabbage choppers.

“I got five letters from readers who said they had a chopper like I wanted. Two of them sent them to me!”

The DeCourcys, married 52 years next October, have considered moving west to be closer to their grown children in California and Hawaii. Moving would involve more than deciding whether to take along the cabbage chopper.

“This house is very important to us,” he confirms. “I have almost a guilt feeling that it’s too important. It is about 220 years old - one of the oldest houses in town. We’ve been here 27 years.

“Could we move? Intellectually, it doesn’t make sense for us to be so far away from our kids. We’re in reasonably good health. But I’m 75 years old; in 20 or 25 years, I won’t be in that good health.

“That’s one side of it. The other is, if we move, we’re going to have to establish new lives - church relationships, doctors, lawyers, neighbors, shopping - even a modified culture and sense of values. I think it would be very difficult for us.”

Their community would surely miss the warmth, gentleness and good humor of both the DeCourcys. Bill Rotch notes, “I don't like to use the word, ‘Christian,’ but if everybody had their outlook on life, this would be a pretty nice world.”

“Christian” might not be such a bad word. The DeCourcys have long been active in the Congregational Church, and Ed particularly values a citation he received last year from the New Hampshire conference of the United Church of Christ. It notes, “You articulate a profound sense of the value of each human life…You are known as a reconciling person…You have been a fierce advocate for missions and for peace and justice concerns.”

When DeCourcy joined the Congregational church as a 12 year old, the minister welcomed him with a Bible verse from Matthew: “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

“I never forgot that,” DeCourcy says.

According to Rotch, DeCourcy never forgot anything.

“Ed has a memory like an elephant,” Bill Rotch maintains admiringly. “He remembers everything. He can tell you who ran for vice president on the Democratic ticket for any year past.”

DeCourcy himself says, “I’m like a squirrel; I never throw anything away.” He will spend an hour pawing through stacks of newspapers, searching for a reference that he recalls reading in the Concord paper sometime last month.

He knows that he ought to cull his references: “I have two sets of encyclopedias. I don’t need two sets of encyclopedias!”

If DeCourcy were to cull every piece of reading material but one, he probably would save a copy of the Constitution.

“I’m a believer in the Constitution,” he says. “I believe it’s in peril; all kinds of people want to pick away at it, erode it, tear it apart.”

Several years ago, as the fourth New Hampshire citizen to receive the Governor’s Award of Distinction, he summed up his beliefs:

“All I did was try to be a good newspaperman: to keep the governed informed in a nation governed by the consent of the governed; to fight to protect freedom of religion, speech, the press, and assembly; to stir up public support for those institutions…that give life to those freedoms; to give the force of law to the people’s right to know; to make people aware that we are part of nature…”

Reviewing the list now, he notes, “The overriding one of all of them isn’t there; that’s world peace.”

The Bill of Rights frequently visits DeCourcy’s columns. One of his Golden Quill editorials condemned the New Hampshire legislature for seeking the names of state residents who attended a Washington political rally sponsored by the Rev. Carl McIntyre.

“The terrifying aspect of the incident…is that men in power in this state want to use that power to stifle the opinions of persons whose opinions differ from theirs,” he wrote.

“Echoes of the pre war Nazi or Communist life, the middle of the night knock on the dissenter’s door after which he was seen no more, are growing louder. If we want America to continue to be the land of the free, all of us, State Legislators included, must remember that there is no freedom for anybody unless there is freedom for all, and that the first freedom is freedom of thought.”

DeCourcy’s citation from the church noted, “Freedom of speech and freedom of the press have been your consuming passions.” Echoing that theme, the editor notes, “People don’t understand what we do and why we do it.

“They used to call me and say, ‘Who authorized you to put that in the paper?’ I finally came up with an answer: Thomas Jefferson!”